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Claims of meteorite aliens taken with pinch of salt

BLACK-AND-WHITE photos of what looks like dried macaroni sparked a mud-slinging match this week, as scientists lined up to dispute claims that alien life had been discovered in a meteorite.

Richard Hoover of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center near Huntsville, Alabama, published a paper in the Journal of Cosmology claiming that several fragments of rare carbonaceous chondrite meteorites contain fossilised bacteria. He used scanning electron microscopy, and claims that fibrous structures in the meteorites are virtually the same size and shape as photosynthetic bacteria found on Earth, particularly a large bacterium called Titanospirillum velox. The tubular structures and T. …